Sunday, January 27, 2013

A Sensible Liberal When the Party Most Needs One

The Liberals are lucky. They have a leadership candidate that could actually help them and the country. No, it's not Trudeau and it's not Hall-Findlay or Garneau. It's Joyce Murray of Vancouver.

Murray, unlike her rivals, wants to restore progressivism to the Liberal Party, something that has been consigned to obscurity since Ignatieff opened shop. Unfortunately the wanna-be Latter Day Ignatieffs that fill the leadership ranks remain decidedly centre-right.

Here's a Murray idea that deserves consideration. The Libs could join forces with those of us from the Green Party. Our leader, Elizabeth May, is for it.

Had Liberals and Greens united behind a single candidate in last
November's byelection in Calgary Centre, Murray says they could have
prevented Tory Joan Crockatt from eking out a narrow victory with just
under 37 per cent of the vote.

The Green Party actually has a robust policy platform that Liberals and uncommitted voters alike could embrace. They're actually the very sorts of things you might have heard from Liberals of twenty or thirty years ago.If the Libs insist on hitching their wagon to sub-prime fossil fuels and what even Allison Redford calls the "bitumen bubble" they're heading down a dead end road. It's time for them to wake up, do themselves and the country a favour, and go Green.

5 comments:

I admire Elizabeth May too. She spoke up about, Harper's treachery of his Omnibull Bill. He is giving Communist China the right, to sue any Canadians blocking, China's intrusion into Canada.

Elizabeth May is all about, what is good for the country, the provinces and the Canadian people. Harper cares about Harper and his own power trip. He started out with a, $13 billion surplus. Canada is in the worst debt, in the recorded history of this Nation. The abuse and waste of our tax dollars, is obscene.

Mulcair says nothing about nothing. He is mute regarding Harper's lies, deceit, corruption, and his cheating to win. Harper selling Canada out to Red China, nil.

Justin Trudeau is all over the place. First against the tar sands, now supporting the tar sands. He is hobnobbing with the BC Liberals. They have worked for Harper, since Campbell's reign of terror. Christy Clark also works for Harper. BC is a hell hole of corruption. Trudeau will not win the BC people over. I doubt very much, the BC Greens would ever support the BC Liberals because, they are not Liberals. They work for Harper.

I thought that the Liberals were supposed to rebuild, not slap a new coat of red paint on a broken down platform. Joyce Murray is making progressive noises now, but if she ever does reach the heights of leadership she will probably have compromised her progressive ideals into nothingness.

And the danger with a Green-Liberal cooperative venture is that we could end up with a Liberal government. But that would be better than the Harperites, you say? I'm not so sure about that.

I agree with Chris Hedges idea. The problem with mainstream politics these days is that you only have two choices: the venal (Harperites) or the mediocre (everybody else).

No, Anon, I think there's a vital distinction between apocalyptic preppers and run-of-the-mill disaster preppers. Not many Canadians are told well in advance that if a particular disaster hits it will be, at the very least, several days before assistance could be expected to arrive.

If/when the Cascadia fault gives way, most settlements on the west coast of the Island will be hammered by the tsunamis. What emergency resources remain will go there, not to the better off east side of the Island. We'll just have to make do.

So our form of prepperism is about getting through for that initial week or two or, perhaps, more. There's nothing remotely nihilistic about that sort of preparedness.